20-Apr-2012

URL shortener with support for multiple services.

Make It Short is a URL shortener for Safari. Just click the toolbar button or choose "Make It Short" from a contextual menu, and a shorter URL for the page will pop up. Copy it and paste it anywhere you like-Twitter, Facebook, an email, or whatever.

Here's what's cool about Make It Short:

It stays out of the way: Your short URL pops up at the top of the page. If you copy it with a keyboard shortcut, the bar disappears automatically. You can also dismiss the bar by pressing any other key, or simply ignore it if you're done with the page. Plus if you like to keep your Safari toolbar clean, you can remove the button and more...

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Make It Short is a URL shortener for Safari. Just click the toolbar button or choose "Make It Short" from a contextual menu, and a shorter URL for the page will pop up. Copy it and paste it anywhere you like-Twitter, Facebook, an email, or whatever.

Here's what's cool about Make It Short:

It stays out of the way: Your short URL pops up at the top of the page. If you copy it with a keyboard shortcut, the bar disappears automatically. You can also dismiss the bar by pressing any other key, or simply ignore it if you're done with the page. Plus if you like to keep your Safari toolbar clean, you can remove the button and access Make It Short by right-clicking (or control-clicking) anywhere on the page.

It supports official short URLs when possible: Make It Short will first check for a shorturl, shortlink, or canonical meta tag. So if you're on www.flickr.com you'll get a flic.kr URL, or if you're on www.youtube.com you'll get a youtu.be URL. If the page doesn't specify its own short URL, Make It Short will get one with your selected service.

It works with images and PDFs too: We've found it's a little tricky to get Safari extensions working on pages that aren't HTML, but Make It Short makes it work.

You can also use a custom service: Just enter the URL to call the service, something like http://example.com/shorten?url=. The current Web page will be added at the end to make the request. The service should return either the short URL by itself, or JSON data with the short URL in an id, url, or shortUrl parameter. If you're using a custom service that requires a password or API key, you'll have to include that in the URL. (Please note that the URL is not stored securely.)